Categories

Meta

This is a true story about how LizardSkin stopped a heartbreaking car fire from turning tragic, wiping out my house and all its contents in the process. In September 2003 I had begun building a 1941 Willys coupe with a steel tube frame, ’57 Chrysler 392 Hemi, 700R4, and a Ford 9-inch rear end. I had spent countless hours and dollars painstakingly putting it all together. I had read about LizardSkin in Street Rodder magazine, and decided to give it a try since its thermal-acoustic properties would greatly reduce noise and heat levels within the car. I only needed one gallon to coat the entire interior. In PICTURE ONE you can see how I then covered the floor and inside firewall with bubble-wrap tinfoil insulation.

On April 15th 2005 I had just taken the Willys for its first drive, and was looking forward to a cross-country road trip in it. I parked the car in my garage, closed the door, and headed off to a restaurant for dinner. When I returned home, I was dumbfounded to see scorch marks on the garage door exterior. PICTURE TWO shows what greeted me when I pulled open the door. The fire had already burned itself out, and no one in the neighborhood had noticed a thing nor called the fire department. It had broken out in the steering column I had taken from a junked ’86 Firebird as a temporary measure just for the test drive. I had planned to replace it with a brand-new after-market steering column. Remarkably, not only had the fire been contained within the garage, but it hadn’t escape the inside of the car itself, thanks to LizardSkin. Without its extraordinary insulating properties, the fire would have spread to the interior of the garage where I also stored a ’58 Chrysler and a motorcycle. From there it would have spread to the house.

The suspected source of the fire is shown in PICTURE THREE. The circle on the column between the mounting bracket and the wheel is the bezel from the speedometer now melted onto the column. PICTURE FOUR looks through the driver’s window to where the side-view mirror used to be. The shiny drip in the lower middle of the image is the melted blob of aluminum it became, indicating just how extreme the heat had been. During clean-up I removed the driver’s door (PICTURE FIVE) giving a view of the burnt-out interior. For PICTURE SIX, I flipped over the dashboard to show how badly damaged the instruments were: you can see what remains of the windshield wiper switch in the middle, as well as the melted gauges. You can also see that the tinfoil insulation from the hardware store had mostly burned, although a few remnants can be seen in the upper right of the image. While the tinfoil would have provided thermal insulation it clearly has no fire retardant capabilities. I pushed what was left of the Willys out of my garage (PICTURE SEVEN). You can see the charred remains of the interior, with the rear windows blackened and the windshield completely gone. Yet on the engine side of the firewall all the wires are untouched! Amazingly, they show no signs of heat damage – all are intact and still functional. I had also coated the interior of the roof with LizardSkin which ended up containing the fire inside the car.

As upsetting as the fire proved to be, I have returned to rebuilding the Willys. Thanks to LizardSkin, I have the groundwork from which to begin. Believe me, when I went to the auto parts supplier to replace what was lost, LizardSkin was the first thing I bought.